History
Indre-et-Loire is one of the original 83 départements created during the French Revolution on 4 March 1790. It was created from the former province of Touraine.
Tours, the departmental prefecture, was a center of learning in the early Middle Ages.
After the creation of the department it remained politically conservative, as Honoré de Balzac recorded in several of his novels. Conservative Tours refused to welcome the railways which instead were obliged to route their lines by way of Saint-Pierre-des-Corps on the city's eastern edge. The moderate temper of the department's politics remained apparent after the trauma of 1870: sentiment remained pro-royalist during the early years of the Third Republic.
For most of the nineteenth century Indre-et-Loire was a rural department, but pockets of heavy-duty industrialisation began to appear towards century's end, accompanied by left-wing politics. 1920 saw the birth of the French Communist Party at the Congress of Tours. By 1920 Saint-Pierre-des-Corps had become a major railway junction and a centre of railway workshops: it had also acquired a reputation as a bastion of working class solidarity.
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